To Crack the Mystery of the Hexagon on Saturn, Researchers Model it in Water
A giant hexagon circling Saturn's north pole has puzzled scientists for decades. Now researchers have managed to recreate the pattern in the lab using little more than water and a spinning table, Science Now reports. The Saturn hexagon seems to represent the strange rigid path of a jet stream, with each of the six sides being one Earth diameter in length. NASA's Voyager spacecraft first spotted it in the early 1980s, and the Cassini spacecraft has followed up with more visible-light and infrared images. Physicists at the University of Oxford set out to recreate the Saturn pattern by placing a 30-liter cylinder of water -- almost 8 gallons -- on a slowly spinning table. They also placed a small ring inside the water tank that whirled more rapidly than the cylinder and created a miniature lab version of the jet stream. Related ArticlesCassini Sends First Full Images of Saturn's Mysterious Giant HexagonMysterious Object...